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Countries Considering Circumlunar Flight From ISS

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the because-they-can dept.

FleaPlus writes "The BBC reports that the space agencies of Europe, Russia, and the US are in (very) preliminary discussions about a potential collaborative mission where astronauts would assemble a small spacecraft at the ISS, then fly it around the Moon and back. This is somewhat similar to previously-proposed commercial missions, with many elements adapted from spacecraft systems already in existence. This would also be a testbed for eventual asteroid and Mars missions, which would likely require modules to be launched on multiple rockets and assembled in space."

3 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Doing what we already did 40 years ago? Yawn. by ByOhTek · · Score: 3, Informative

    [...] and it'll be nobody's fault when it fails. Except maybe the French.

    But people will blame the USA no matter what.

    --
    Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
  2. Re:Send the whole thing! by sznupi · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's designed for quite safe LEO radiation environment, deep inside the magnetosphere of Earth.

    --
    One that hath name thou can not otter
  3. Re:The ISS is in the wrong orbit for this! by butalearner · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's in the wrong orbit to do anything other than be reachable by launches from mainland Russia. It's not like no one ever thought of using the space station as a jumping-off point before, it's just that such ideas were made more or less impractical as soon as we decided to put the space station in this silly orbit.

    Of course, the fact that the goal was to be reachable by launches from Baikonur means it's not a silly orbit, considering inclination changes are the most expensive in terms of delta-v (and money, as a result).